BOULDER, CO — Panic gripped Boulder’s city government this week after motorists reported experiencing the unthinkable: two consecutive green lights.
“I was on my morning commute down Canyon,” recalled Boulder’s now-former Chief Traffic Light Engineer, Chip McCoy. “I got a green at 9th Street and then—bam—another green at Broadway. I thought I was hallucinating. That’s not supposed to happen in this town.”
Unfortunately for McCoy, City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde was also on the road that morning and nearly made it to work before her coffee cooled. Horrified, she called McCoy into her office and relieved him of duty for “gross negligence in the performance of making driving hell.”
Under Boulder’s Vision Zero Sense transportation plan, all traffic lights are required to be deliberately mis-timed so drivers are trapped in an endless cycle of stopping, inching forward, and contemplating moving to Longmont.
McCoy insists it was just a glitch: “We run the entire traffic signal system on a Commodore 64 from 1982, which usually ensures drivers never get through more than one light at a time. But somehow the old beast went rogue and synced them. It was chaos. People were smiling. That’s not Boulder.”
Mayor Aaron Brockett was reportedly furious when his morning drive took a mere three minutes instead of the city-mandated twenty-seven. “If we let cars flow freely, people might stop biking in 14-degree weather just to prove a point,” he said. “And next they’ll want… functional roads.”
At press time, Boulder officials announced a new safeguard: every green light will now be immediately followed by a spontaneous road closure for “emergency yoga.”
